April 22, 2020

Artist paints on toilet paper, strings it up in Utrecht

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:58 pm

Currently stranded in The Netherlands due to the Coronavirus crisis, American artist Daniel Miller, 33, has recently been painting tulips on toilet paper and hanging it around Utrecht. He needed to get something artistic out of his system, something ‘positive and absurd’, he said, and tulips on loo roll definitely qualifies.

On his art you can read the text “If you see me, you can take me”, in Dutch. Free art – we love free stuff in this country! He’s a quick study.

Daniel came to The Netherlands to get inspired and visit friends, but one hour after he landed, the Corona measures kicked in and he was destined to hang out with us a while longer.

Every day Daniel goes around town and hangs up his painted toilet paper tulips, hoping to bring some hope and happiness to people. “The Coronavirus is unavoidable. What surprises me is our reaction to it. How we blame each other, how we panic and come up with conspiracy theories.”

Be sure to check him out on instagram.

(Link: rtvutrecht.nl)

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April 10, 2020

Oldest known Corona patient, 107-year-old Dutch woman, cured

Filed under: Dutch first,Health,History by Orangemaster @ 2:59 pm

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), The Netherlands’ ‘Tante Cor’ (‘Aunt Cor)’, real name Cornelia Ras from Goeree-Overflakkee, South Holland, is said to be the oldest Corona patient in the world to have been cured of Covid-19. Although the actual age of a number of elderly patients has not been determined, chances are that Tante Cor is the oldest, with a 104-year-old man from Oregon, Unites States coming in second place.

Tante Cor contracted the virus during a church service in her nursing home, now known hotbeds of contamination in many parts of the world. Forty other people were contaminated as well, ten of which have died, sadly not a unique occurrence.

A few other hundred-year-olds in The Netherlands have also recovered: a 101-year-old woman from Capelle aan den IJssel, South Holland as well as a 103-year-old man from Steenbergen, Noord-Brabant.

(Link: nu.nl, Photo of random old people by Flickr user Freeparking, some rights reserved)

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April 1, 2020

What are we going to do with all the potatoes?

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:51 am

In The Netherlands many snacks bars have shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, although a lot of places do offer take away, but that means there are now a lot of leftover potatoes – not couch potatoes! – hanging around all day, doing nothing.

I say make some vodka, but that takes the right people to sort that out. It’s probably illegal and dangerous as well, so I’m just riffing here.

Since The Netherlands is one of the main producers of potatoes for making fries, some 1.5 million tons of potatoes, two thirds of which cannot be sold, are going to waste, awaiting a compensation package for the agricultural sector.

“Corona is impacting all sectors. Brussels is not going to regard this as a priority.” The stagnating market is having a knock on effect on potato processing firms, such as Aviko, which produces some 15 million potato products in a normal week. Deep fried chips are being made until the company runs out of space to store them.

Getting rid of a billion kilos of potatoes is not easy to do and only some of the potatoes are going to food banks, probably because they don’t boil very well. Other possibilities to process the potatoes include bio fermentation and use in the animal fodder and potato starch industries.

And since you have heard it already, a Van Gogh was stolen in Laren while museums have shut down due to the Corona virus.

(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo: Vincent van Gogh potato-flavoured ice cream from Ede)

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March 31, 2020

Woman claims prize, a (now) antique radio, after 80 years

Filed under: Gaming by Branko Collin @ 1:32 pm

A woman from Rotterdam won the first prize in an 80-year old competition that she had forgotten to enter as a girl.

In 1940 a then 11-year old Tjits Drenth solved a rebus of the Jamin candy chain store, but then the war broke out and she either forgot or ignored the competition.

Earlier this year, when cleaning her place, she discovered the old rebus and decided to send it to Jamin as a historical memento. The company saw a marketing opportunity (or so I assume) and decided to award a prize.

Jamin wasn’t able to find out if the prizes for the competition had ever been awarded, its archive having a big 1938-1950-shaped hole in it, so they decided to give the now Mrs. Den Tuinder-Drenth the main prize. An original Erres tube radio KY 188 was found on Marktplaats, an Ebay owned classified advertising site, and fixed up—although it also gained bluetooth in the process somehow.

The competition asked entrants “What does baron Benjamin say?” The first prize was a radio, the second a sewing machine, the third a vacuum cleaner and the fourth a bicycle—all from Erres, a company from The Hague later bought by Philips.

Mrs. Den Tuinder – Drenth was glad she won first prize, which she received on 3 March from Jamin CEO Maarten Steinkamp. She told AD.nl: “I do not know how to sew, so the sewing machine would have been of no use to me. I am very happy with the radio, however, because I listen to the radio a lot.” Her favourite channels are NPO1 and NPO5.

(Illustrations: AD.nl)

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March 11, 2020

Van Gogh goes for 15 million euro in Maastricht

Filed under: Art,History by Orangemaster @ 4:36 pm

‘Peasant woman in front of a farmhouse’ (‘Paysanne devant une chaumière’ in French), an 1885 work by Vincent van Gogh that was bought back in the 1960s in the UK for about 5 euro, just sold for 15 million euro at the world’s premier art fair TEFAF in Maastricht, Limburg.

It’s one of those stories were someone had left the painting in a cellar for years until a local antique merchant bought it at an auction for next to nothing. One year later, the painting was sold to a journalist for about 53 euro; he showed it the Tate Gallery director and it was deemed to be a Van Gogh. The journalist then auctioned it off in 1970 at Sotheby’s in New York City where it fetched USD 110.000 (97.455 euro).

In 2001 the work was sold for the last time at Sotheby’s for 1.5 million euro. Today, at 15 million euro, it’s the most expensive artwork ever sold at the TEFAF, although not all sales at the annual event are made public.

(Link: ad.nl, image artnet.com)

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February 29, 2020

The Letter for the King gets the Netflix treatment

Filed under: Dutch first,Literature,Shows by Branko Collin @ 1:59 pm

On 20 March 2020, Netflix will start running its mini-series The Letter for the King based on the 1962 children’s book of the same name by Tonke Dragt.

Set in the middle ages, knight-in-training Tiuri is tasked by a stranger to deliver a letter to the king and save the world in the process. The adventure spans six episodes. Dragt wrote a sequel to her book, The Secrets of the Wild Wood, so who knows? If this series does well, they might commission another.

According to an interview with Dragt in Trouw last year, this is the first Dutch book that is being turned into an international series by Netflix. Dragt, now 89:

I immediately said no to a couple of [changes Netflix had planned]. No torture! They wanted to remove shield-bearer Piak from the story but I said: Piak stays. And they wanted to make Tiuri’s background more interesting, but I was against that—he is a regular boy. Children must be able to think: that could happen to me. Will I keep the promise [to deliver the letter]?

I had never heard of [Netflix]. So now I need to stay alive for a little while longer, until I have seen at least the first episode. Will it be good or disappointing? I will decide then if I will watch more of it.

Dragt’s stories often revolve around dualities, about finding that crack in the middle to slip through. Tiuri gets the tough choice: do I follow the formal steps that will get me knighted or do I throw that all away so that I can behave knightly?

In De Zevensprong, a so-called seven-way junction is the starting point for a mystery: there are only six roads. The book plays with the notion that a fork in the road is where a single road splits in two—or are they three roads meeting? The duality must be resolved to find the key to the mystery.

And Dragt’s The Towers of February posits that today, Leap Day, is the only time you can slip between realities.

See also: The Dutch like Dutch children’s literature the best

(Illustration: Netflix)

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February 27, 2020

Dutch government loses track of 2.3 million workers

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:39 pm

Since 2014 the Dutch government has lost track of some 2.3 million seasonal workers, all foreigners who don’t have to register where they live if it they come over for less than four months, making them difficult to track down. However, that also means nobody can check whether they are being exploited or mistreated. They do have an identification number (in Dutch, ‘BSN’) to be able to receive their salaries in their bank accounts, but that’s it.

Have they stayed in the Netherlands, have they gone? No idea.

As explained by Dutchnews.nl, people planning to live in the Netherlands for more than four months are required to officially register with their local authority using a formal address. As explained by my personal experience of 20 years in this country, people make up addresses or use ones that have 20 people registered in it, which is illegal, but often goes unchecked.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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February 19, 2020

Vintage Dutch tech site calls it a day

Filed under: History,Online,Technology by Orangemaster @ 5:50 pm

Webwereld, one of the oldest tech news sites of the Netherlands, is going to cease to exist. We enjoyed using them as a source for subjects such as high speed wireless internet (wimax), NL-alert (national alarm system), net neutrality and quite a few more.

The tech-savvy site had been around since 1995, and editorial staff were sent packing about a month ago. The site will go offline on 1 March, and its owner, IDG, will apparently continue on with business sites.

Way back in in the day, having a 24-hour online news service about IT was a big deal and quite new, at least in such a small country and language region as the Netherlands. One of the cool things they did was launch ‘lektober’ (‘leaktober’) in 2011, which featured company data leaks back when companies didn’t quite know how to deal with them (they still don’t, but OK).

Thanks for the good stories, Webwereld!

(Link: bright.nl)

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February 12, 2020

Dutch artist tattoos 6673 people for international artwork

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 12:38 pm

Artist Sander van Bussel of Tilburg Cowboys came up with the Human Rights Tattoo in 2012 after the death of friend and human rights activist Steven ‘Nyash’ Nyagah from Kenya.

Being the largest, most profound living work of art to date, Human Rights Tattoo aims to give the Declaration a universal voice on a human level and daily basis.

The Human Rights Tattoo features the Universal Declaration of Human Rights letter for letter on 6773 people worldwide. Every individual gets one letter, and there’s currently some 2500 letters to go. There’s also a website that functions as a place where all the tattooed folks can talk to each other and share information.

(Links: fonkonline.nl, info.humanrightstattoo.org, Photo of Dragon tattoo by Deanna Wardin, some rights reserved)

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February 10, 2020

Dutch shortage of medical devices on the horizon

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 11:52 am

After a very long period in 2018 without being able to buy birth control pills due to a situation that was nothing short of a clusterfuck, there’s a looming shortage of medical devices waiting to happen in a few months and it seems many people are going to watch it happen.

Due to newer and stricter European rules that will apply as of May 26, thousands of medical devices people depend on will not be re-approved on time, causing a severe shortage of things like breast implants, artificial hips, knee prostheses, and pacemakers, putting healthcare at risk.

“Manufacturers draw their own line and do not indicate where the problems are. As well, manufacturers blame the inspection authorities. In the end, the patient may become the victim.” explains Ad Melkert of the Dutch Hospitals Association. In the Netherlands Melkert is synonymous with ‘Melkert jobs’, make-work projects that were meant to provide certain social classes with ‘busy work’.

“The products need a lot of certifications and there are too few organizations that can deliver that,” explains Erik Vollebregt of Amsterdam law firm Axon, representing medical companies struggling with the regulations. “Smaller manufacturers in particular are the victims. Large manufacturers are given priority over the small ones. It leads to preferential treatment for manufacturers who are willing to pay more for timely approval.”

I think the victims will be people, but what do I know.

(Link: nltimes.nl)

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